Wild Wednesday ~ Ice Sculpture

Winter finally decided to get serious this weekend, with temperatures dropping below zero Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights (negative 13 Monday morning!).

The ice on the river, which had been a soggy mess reformed (upstream; downstream it's been a wide-open channel all winter) and C and I took a walk upstream on Monday. 

The ice had formed all kinds of interesting shapes over the weeks of melt and freeze and melt and freeze, with the last places to freeze over, low and shiny, and forbiddingly dark.

Remember in the fall when I was looking for a witch hazel tree? We found one leaning out over the water--where I could never have gotten to back in November. The little flower-looking thingies are the calyxes, or the whorl of flower sepals. 

We saw so many interesting patterns and formations in the ice: scallops.

Whorls.

Serrations.

Bundles of needles.

Bubbles of ice flowing out of the side of the bank.

Ice islands in ice streams.

Puzzle pieces.

Fish bones of slick, shiny black ice.

Another thing we wouldn't see without walking on the river--the way the hemlock trees grow right out of the side of the bank; in fact, the way they hold the bank back and keep it from collapsing into the river.

And also this fungus growing on a tree where we climbed back up onto land. I don't know what it is, but it looks pretty neat.

What's wild in your neck of the woods this week?
 

Happy Valentine's Day!

New Year, New Me, Part 3 ~ The Habits

Inspired by this post, I decided to start tracking my daily habits in my bullet journal. 

My habit list included things I already did (though not necessarily daily) like 10,000 steps and swimming, things I want to do more of (writing, time in nature) and a whole new morning routine, inspired by this post, by the same blogger. Her routine of 'SAVERS' is made up of silence, affirmation, visualization, exercise, reading, and scribing.

I know some people say not to start too many habits at once, but I found having a great big habit list to be liberating, because I can always accomplish at least something on the list, and if I get to the end of the day without getting much of anything done, I can eat a carrot and x off "5 a day" or drink a couple glasses of water and mark off "hydrate." I also added "reading" to the list partway through the month, not because I need encouragement to read, but I was curious how often I do (turns out, pretty much every day).

I'm surprised how well I did in January, and that the morning routine was the most successful part. It's nice starting the day off well. I have some glaring blanks, however, most notably under "gratitude" and "kindness." I've already talked about how hard gratitude is for me, but I've decided that if I focus on a specific event (I'm grateful my son asked how my day went), rather than a general state of being, I can fool the evil gods.



Kindness threw up a similar roadblock: what exactly is kind? Is it kind to pick up someone's papers off the photocopier and take them to them, or is it just nosy? Is it kind to let a car in ahead of you when you've got nowhere in particular to be, or does it only count if you're in a hurry? Is it kind to treat your kids and husband well, even though that's what you're supposed to do? I don't know why (I think it's my Catholic upbringing), but it seems like an act of kindness is only really kindness if you don't want to do it. I see I'm going to need to work on that.

At the end of January, I realized my habits fell into five general categories--morning, health, nature, brain, and being a good person (I don't have one-word phrase for that yet)--and I arranged my February list accordingly. My morning routine evolved from SAVERS to YSAVRS, for: Yoga (I have book of different yoga routines for each day of the week, each taking about 10 minutes, which is all I have time for), Silence (about a 3-breath meditation is all I can manage), Affirmation (I still find these pretty corny, but I'm going with it), Visualization (I'm a natural daydreamer, so this is easy for me), Read a Poem (I've wanted to get more poetry in my life for a long time, but it doesn't work for me to read poem after poem after poem; one a day sets just the right tone), scribble (a paragraph dashed off in my journal--much more accurate and realistic, and less fusty that "scribe").

Speaking of habits, I gave up on the Gretchen Ruben book. I hate to say it, but it was kind of ... boring. Or maybe she was boring--every time she described some trait about herself, like wearing the same type of clothes every day, not liking travel, only eating plain food I was like, "Gah! I don't think I want to take this woman's advice for fear of turning into her." So I returned it to the library.

Wild Wednesday ~ New Nature Books

I've been loving teaching my nature journaling and nature writing workshops over the last few months. I've always hesitated to teach, because I thought teachers needed to be these extroverted, really energetic, bouncy types (which I am most assuredly not), but it's turned out to be very fun, challenging, and rewarding. So I'm glad that the volunteer requirements of the Master Naturalist program forced me into it. On top of the inherent pleasures of the "job," an added bonus is that it gives me an excuse to buy new books, and these four little beauties landed in my mailbox last month.

Into the Field is a handy little guide, designed for classroom teachers to incorporate nature journaling and nature writing and place-based learning into their curricula, but I've found it helpful for my workshops as well. I had originally gotten it through the library, but ran out of time to finish it before it was due back and decided it would be nice to have a copy of my own.

I don't remember where I ran across Letters From Eden--I think when I was browsing for something else online--but it sounded like a perfect book for me: essays and drawings of the natural world around one calendar year. I haven't had a chance to start reading it yet, but I adore these sketches that are scattered throughout the text.

The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady is a classic nature journal example that I've been meaning to get a copy of for a long time. I finally went ahead and ordered it to use as an example for my students of what they should NOT expect their journals to look like. I've found people get so worked up about their drawings being "good" that they are afraid to get started. I think they have an image of this book (or something similar) in their heads and don't want to go through the steps of making messy, less-than-perfect drawings in order to see what's in the natural world (and, hopefully, learn to draw better). I'm not sure if showing them this book will help or make things worse!

Again, I don't know how I ran across the Law's Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling, but I preordered it on a whim last fall and I am so glad I did.

It's so thorough and full of information about observing the natural world as well as advanced drawing techniques that I've never run across in my smattering of art classes.

Not to mention his drawings are utterly gorgeous! I want to apprentice myself to this book, and spend the next several months (or years, more likely) going through each page and exercise.

Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall

My friend Helene holds a paint night at her art gallery every few months and I've tried to make it every chance I get. It's just fun to slather paint on canvas and drink wine and chat and walk around looking at everyone's creation. This month we painted a snowy scene with a tree and a little house. Right now mine holds the place of honor over our mantel, because I got sick of our Modigliani print last summer and I haven't found a piece of real art that I can afford that will fit there.

The next day after paint night, I got the boys going on a paint project. I'd seen in a coffee shop with art for sale on its walls a picture of birch trees on a solid background and thought "we can do better than that." I picked up some smallish canvasses at the craft store, and gave one to each of the boys (and myself) and we taped strips of masking tape from top to bottom. I then gave them each a palette of paint to represent one of the seasons (purple, white, and blue for winter; red, yellow, orange for fall; dark and light green and yellow for summer; and blue, green, yellow, and pink for spring). I couldn't quite think of how to differentiate colors between summer and spring, and having unrelated colors on a single palette ended up being a mistake, especially since E, who likes to mix his colors into mud, chose spring.

After we painted our backgrounds, we went out for a stomp, looking at birch and aspen trees along the way.

When we got back, we peeled off the tape and added the dark lines (lenticels and branch scars) to the trees.

From left to right: Winter, by M; Spring, by E; Summer, by Mama; Fall by Z.

I absolutely LOVE how they turned out (even E's mud. Spring is, after all, mud season here in Maine). Perhaps I should stop looking in art galleries for a piece of artwork to hang over the mantel and turn instead to my resident artists.

Winter Comings and Goings

Oops, I didn't mean to take a blog break. It turns out I can only keep so many plates spinning at a time--a project that had been in "hurry up and wait" mode for months and months suddenly hit "hurry up" mode and the nature writing class I'm teaching has taken much more preparation time than I anticipated (but it's all good), so the blog plate fell out of the air for a little while. I think I'm back on track now. In the meantime, we've had some snow and some ice and some warm, melty days and then some more snow. I'm glad the snow is back, because it was starting to look like March out there and that's no good for my psyche (my brain thinks "Tulips!" and the world says "Mud!").

It's been such a strange, warm winter. I went snowshoeing for the first time this weekend, though I didn't, strictly speaking, need snowshoes. Our river ice has pretty much all broken up in the last two weeks--there was never enough ice anywhere for iceskating (for my comfort level anywhere). I'm okay with the warmer temperatures, as long as we have snow, not mud (not that it's up to me). Happy February, friends.

P.S. For anyone wondering what the picture of the car driving through the snow wall was all about:

And